Users of the internet no longer want to browse through endless sites to find their solutions. They would prefer that the information they are looking for be brought to them. Many websites now offer syndication technologies such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom and disseminate feeds related to their site content.
Users can read these feeds now through readers, browsers, on cell phones, and in syndication feed mashups offered as personalized pages for users. These personalized pages (offered by Google™, Yahoo™, Microsoft™, IBM™ developer spaces, Netvibes™, etc) can aggregate a user's feeds and present them as a custom newspaper that caters to the reader's particular interests. Users no longer have to visit different websites to peruse their favorite sites every day. Instead the content they look for most often can be made available on one non-monolithic web page that collects content from sites all over the web. This non-monolithic web page displays content from external sources, such as syndication feeds, on a unified web page.
However, traditional site metrics are calculated based on page views and click-throughs. Personalized pages and mashups present content from external sources which may be viewed by the user, but unless the user “clicks through” to the original content, traditional methods of determining the audience for content do not accurately reflect the value of a particular piece of content. For example, if a site has 300,000 tracked users and twice as many tracked views, but there are 450,000 actual readers and a high volume of user interaction not tracked by views, it can be a detriment to a site's business. In this case, the site is not getting credit for the traffic being generated by the content on the site.